Coaching: A Good Investment for Your Startup

What is coaching?

Coaching is often confused with mentoring, also sometimes consulting or training. Coaching is defined as “partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential.” By ICF*.

An ICF coach is someone who is trained to help individuals or groups achieve specific goals. They do this by colloborating with their clients to identify obstacles, create action plans, and overcome challenges. Many people hire a coach to help them reach their full potential and create lasting change in different areas of life, including business, relationships, health, and wellness. Benefits of coaching include improved communication and relationship skills, greater self-awareness, increased confidence, better time management skills and improved goal setting and achievement.

The impact of coaching in startup success

The founders of successful startups have a few things in common: they are passionate, visionary, and coachable. While the first two qualities are essential for any entrepreneur, the third is often overlooked.

Startups have different stages, and each stage feels like a fresh start and a new challange. This is especially true for startup founders who may not have any prior experience in running and scaling a company. This is where coaching becomes most impactful..

Coaching can help founders to focus on vision and goals, staying motivated through tough early days.

Growth mindset is essential for scale-up and growth stage startups. Founders need to clarify and communicate the vision and turn it into strategies in order to achieve growth. A coach can work with founders to identify and overcome any self-limiting beliefs that may be holding them back.

Coaching as an investment tool

Coaching is often cited as one of the most key factors in CEO success. Investors are often more willing to invest in startups that have a coach on board. A founder is perceived serious about making the business a success if he/she is seeking out help and guidance in order to adopt, keep the pace and grow.

Coaching can lead to a ROI of up to 600%. higher levels of satisfaction with their jobs and saw greater improvements in their leadership skills.

Founder, co-funders and investors form a team. A coach can also offer guidance on how to deal with the challenges, setbacks and communication issues that are inevitable in any investment journey.

While investors may offer advice,and mentoring, the reality is that founders usually are not good at taking advice and mostly lack the skills to execute on it. If you want to give your startup the best chance to succeed, coaching the founder is a good investment.

A good coach will help founders to clarify their vision, set realistic goals and put together a plan of action.

In summary, coaching can offer significant benefits for both investors and startup founders. For investors, coaching can help to improve decision-making and increase discipline and focus. For founders, coaching can provide clarity, direction, and support at each stage.

*ICF – International Coaching Federation is the biggest coaching organization globally.

Anil Erkan